Bagged ice at grocery stores, gas stations, and other facilities provides an important convenience to consumers who need a large quantity of ice at once. To meet such demands, many retailers receive regular deliveries of ice from an ice manufacturer. However, for some retailers, deliveries are too infrequent or too expensive given the size of the deliveries needed, the consumer demand for ice, or the remoteness or location of the retailer. Those retailers that need to maintain a large inventory of ice often have an industrial ice machine that makes ice on site, eliminating the need for deliveries of ice. This is a common practice for large grocery stores and warehouse stores, for example.
Ice vending machines—ice merchandisers that create, bag, and vend ice—provide considerable cost savings to the retailer. The retailer does not need to pay the ice manufacturer or vendor, who must cover the costs of ice factory worker salaries, driver salaries, fuel costs, delivery truck maintenance and insurance, and other costs. Further, the retailer avoids exposure to ice shortages due to infrequent deliveries of ice.
Other retailers may not be large, but are remote. Convenience stores and small grocers in rural areas may infrequently receive ice deliveries, and so are subject to ice shortages, or, conversely, an oversupply of ice just after a delivery. For such retailers, ice deliveries are an imperfect solution.
Ice vending machines are thus helpful to many retailers. However, conventional ice vending machines have a number of drawbacks. Most are quite expensive because they are very complicated. Corresponding—or perhaps owing—to the complexity, most are structurally intricate and frequently need repair. Repair can take a long time, because the vending machines are designed poorly, with inlaid and dependent parts that require a great deal of labor to remove, service, and replace. To replace one part of the vending machine, for example, several overlying parts may need to be removed to gain access to the one part. Further, if those overlying parts are moving parts, their proper replacement and positioning is critical. Thus, a repair person must be a skilled technician and will generally need a great deal of time to fix a broken ice vending machine. For the retailer, this translates into increased hourly labor costs, a likely increased duration of labor, and a loss of sales during the downtime.
Most ice vending machines include an ice merchandiser, a bagger, and one or several ice makers. Merchandisers are refrigerated cabinets in which ice is stored. These often are not a major source of repairs. Nor are the ice makers, which are conventional technology for creating different types of ice. Rather, most service calls on an ice vending machine are related to the bagger, the part of the vending machine which fills and seals the bags of ice. An improved bagger for ice vending machines is needed.